The road not taken makes all the difference; just how much difference doesn't become clearer, though, until the damage is done. That's one major takeaway from this memoir that landed on our library's New Books section, and proved an irresistible draw for a review.
Start with the obvious question: who would work for Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theory merchant? And, once that merchant became associated with the biggest of Big Lies – notably, the Sandy Hook mass shootings, which Jones wrote off as a staged event – why continue working for his 24-7 noise machine, helping to make the world a worse place?
For author Josh Owens, the answer began the minute he dropped out of film school. He needed to find a job fast, to support himself and his girlfriend, and Jones's Infowars outlet seemed like an ideal solution. A video submission to an Infowars reporting contest earned Owens a trip to Austin, TX, leaving him “stuck outside a locked door, desperately trying to get in,” he writes, as the book opens in May 2013.
It's an appropriately low-key start. As Owens points out, the figure who hired him as a camera operator/editor had yet to become a household word, even after the initial notoriety he'd earned for calling the 9/11 attacks "an inside job." The Infowars office “looked more like an unkempt college media department,” he jokes, one crammed with cables, stacks of printed articles, and broadcast equipment, all piled willy-nilly.
The job smells like the usual first-time experience of planning to invest in the minimum commitment, before moving on to bigger and better things. Owens's online information searches raise no initial alarms, having yielded a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist British playwright, and female Eurovision dance competition finalist, before coming across the man himself.
Warm bodies are few, so the hours are long, ensuring a heady atmosphere that feels far more appealing than a standard media setting -- even for those who don't buy Jones's outlook (like Owens himself). But it's also a landscape that require unique moral compromises, such as when Jones begins selling a series of dubious supplements in September 2013 – since even his status as a fast-rising star in the attention span economy simply isn't enough, by itself, to pay the bills.
The compromises begin piling on the job, too. One memorable example comes from an attempt to infiltrate a government-operated data center in Utah, to get illicit footage for Jones's show. Confronted by a federal agent, Owens and his co-workers get the footage by distracting him, then switching cards, just before the camera goes off (“I might not have been willing to risk my life, or more realistically, my freedom, but I still wanted Jones's approval”).
Jones's side hustles rear
their head at the strangest times, too. A project to record local radiation levels – so the boss can somehow tie
them in with the Fukushima reactor disaster -- produces no results over many long, fruitless miles (see NPR link below). Finally, a solution arrives, via a diehard fan who's already been taking Jones's iodine supplement, citing
his own fears of radiation.
Presto! Now they can build a program around this person, add some archival footage, and call it a day. It's a conveniently self-reinforcing
loop that drives home an uncomfortable early truth about
Jones's impact, for the author: “No matter how much he pushed the line of decency,
and often jumped over it with appalling force, things would somehow
pan out for him.”
A reporter who questions the trip as an excuse for selling iodine earns a tongue-lashing rejoinder from producer Rob Dew (or “Dewcifer,” around the Infowars office), who claims that Jones is only hawking the supplements to boost his show's production values, and the fortunes of those on his payroll: “Wouldn't you like to make more money?”
But Jones's staff aren't the only ones saying, “Hell, yeah!” to such questions. As Jones's profile rises, he begins paying closer attention to his appearance, what types of products are selling, and what kinds of pitches might crank his fame to new heights (“We're not selling penny stocks! We're not some small-time investment firm!”). He even lands a role as a US Senator in Armageddon, “one of those Christian patriot propaganda films with dialogue so bad and a plot so thin,” as Owens describes it (fittingly, it's the brainchild of Chuck Norris's son, Mike).
Jones begins swimming in bigger circles, as well. One of the most memorable scenes involves a meeting with Tucker Carlson, where they agree on almost everything – except Jones's belief on 9/11 attacks were an inside job (Carlson doesn't buy the "inside job" hypothesis). Still, the encounter between the Little and Large of conspiracy theory proves amiable enough to make plans for shooting guns, the next time that Tucker's in town (“Little did they know, this was the beginning of something much larger, a convergence that would shape the very fabric of a post-truth era.”)
A confrontation with fellow conspiracist Pete Santilli goes less swimmingly (see the Hollywood Reporter excerpt below). Santilli, who's fallen out with Jones, rolls up to his compound, determined to expose him as a shill, by claiming that his father worked for the CIA. He's unceremoniously shooed away, as Owens and his bemused colleagues watch: “The fact that neither of the shock jock conspiracy theorists recognized the irony of calling one another conspiracy theorists was not lost on me.”
Another memorable encounter, for all the wrong reasons, comes with the late, disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker – making a twilight-era comeback from selling storable foods, survival gear and books on everything from demonic possession to 9/11 conspiracies, giving Owens an uncomfortable shudder of familiarity with his boss's business model (“Create an atmosphere of perpetual dread by twisting current events to fit an ideology, then conveniently offer a solution to the very problems you've fabricated or amplified, all for profit”).
The author finds himself dragged off for a dreary breakfast with Bakker and Steve Quayle, best known for claiming that giant aliens living underground ran the federal government. The pair spend much of their time dismissing Hillary Clinton's 2016 candidacy for President (“They're called the founding fathers, not the founding mothers," snipes Quayle). The situation leaves Owens fuming in silence, waiting for his hosts to stop talking: “It had been a long two days and I felt exponentially dumber than when we'd arrived.”
As vivid as
these warning signs might appear, they seem like a mere dress rehearsal for
the circus of Trump's 2016 presidential victory, and the arrival of acolytes like Roger Stone, who drops his own unusual claims (namely, how a doctor tried to poison him with polonium). But Owens also unexpectedly bumps into Jon Ronson, a reporter whom he'd last seen 16 years earlier, as they both chased a scoop on the notorious Bohemian Grove enclave, for totally different reasons.
Soon, Owens is detailing the realities of Jones's operation, via off-radar conversations that provide Ronson with grist for a major magazine article about -- and build the psychic runway of finally working up the nerve to quit. Jones often reminded his employees that their Infowars days "would forever stain our resumes and limit our prospects," Owens writes, in part. “It finally dawned on me. This wasn't just a
job; it was a trap.”
Yet Owens manages to swallow his growing unease a bit longer, for the usual mundane reasons (“self-preservation, ambition, and the quiet comfort of going along.”). He's just not ready to give up a lifestyle that increasingly resembles Dante's Inferno, “with each successive ring more hellish than the last, but at least the food was good,” he writes. "Only in our catastrophic scenario, we had had helped strike the match and seemed to welcome the raging inferno we'd created.”
It's presumably the reason why Owens and his partner dine out at Comet Pizza, a target of conspiracy theories that led to an armed man stalking the Washington, D.C. establishment, searching for the pedophile ring he believed to be lurking there. Alex Jones said it, so it must be true, right? (North Carolina police killed the gunman, Edgar Maddison Welch, in an unrelated shootout last year.)
Gradually, though, Owens's growing internal discomfort prompts him to physically avoid Jones whenever possible (“I had gone from his star employee to the office ghost”), The author's response comes in marked contrast to his boss, who settles the fallout of his actions – yet another lawsuit, relating to his "Pizzagate" claims – without fanfare, all so that he can continue profiting from his conspiracy empire.
When the inevitable psychic crunch comes, Owens takes a 75 percent pay cut as the price of landing his next job (managing small businesses' social media accounts). His decision tees up a final showdown with Jones, who professes dissatisfaction with his own lot (“I feel like I'm not doing enough 'cause I'm in this war”). But Jones's offers to double the author's pay, and fund a film for him, fail to land, earning a cold reception from his onetime star protege: “I told him it wasn't about money and turned him down. That made him angry.”
The book ends with Owens watching Jones work his malevolent magic one more time, barking into a megaphone during an anti-lockdown protest in front of the Texas State Capitol building. It's a setting that invokes one more opportunity to revisit the guilt gnawing at him, from helping so grimy a man rocket to such ill-earned prominence: “I wondered if any of them had seen the videos I'd filmed, the reports I'd edited, the lies I'd helped disseminate.”
The depressing answer is, yes, they most certainly did. Why did you enable this situation for so long? Was Owens just another wide-eyed naif, perpetually incapable of reading the room, with his sociopathic taskmaster goaded him to ever-dizzying heights of virtual depravity? Call it a case of Oppenheimer Syndrome, perhaps: “I am death, shatterer of worlds. Who knew?”
Or did he approach his
job like countless '60s bands who closed their eyes, crossed their
fingers, and signed their lives away, in some
vague hopes that they might finally earn some sort of reward from chasing their dream? Needless to say, it didn't work out that way, though in fairness to Owens, he's still trying to work out those answers himself, as he told NPR (see link below):
"I would love to continue growing. I
would love to be a better person. And so I just felt like I needed to
clear things up for myself. Why was I there? Why did I do these
things? Why did I stick around for so long? I don't have all the
answers now, but I think exploring it and asking those questions and
taking accountability was just sort of part of the process."
Perhaps another answer lies in the permission structure that Jones creates, for those willing to follow, "where, like, hey, you don't have to
apologize for who you are," Owens tells NPR. "You don't have to apologize for what you
do. You don't have to learn. You don't have to grow. Listen to me.
You know, we're going to take over the world. That seems to be his narrative now."
If nothing else, The Madness Of Believing offers a cautionary tale of acolytes wanting to make a name for themselves, only to wind up “caught in an echo chamber of nothing but one man's desire for wealth and infamy,” Owens observes. It's a sobering reminder, for anyone still needing it, of how evil can't rise – alongside the proverbial cream – without plenty of outside help. --The Reckoner
Links To Go (So You Don't End Up Occupying
The Same Moral Space As "Hitler's Architect"):
Former Alex Jones Employee Says:
"It Was Nonsense, It Was Lies":
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5763689
The Guardian:
"It Was Constant Chaos": Ex-Infowars Producer
On Life Under Alex Jones:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/19/alex-jones-josh-owens-infowars
The Hollywood Reporter:
A Former Infowars Staffer Tells All (Exclusive Excerpt):
